SPR members Montague Keen, Arthur Ellison and David Fontana attended sessions and published their Proceedings report in 1999, stating they could not detect fraud. Critics note the mediums controlled conditions: sessions in their cellar, no infrared filming permitted, no independent magicians present, and many phenomena, like images on factory-sealed film, that stage mentalists reproduce. No independently witnessed, instrumented replication exists.
The group claimed contact with a cooperative of communicators and produced apports, a 1940s newspaper, poems by dead authors, and personal messages for sitters. Believers treat the volume of output as cumulative evidence.
The structural reading: Scole tested whether experienced observers can detect deception in conditions designed to prevent detection, and the honest answer, from a century of séance research, is no. It stands as the modern best case for physical mediumship and simultaneously as the demonstration that best case and controlled case are different categories.
When the best case for the afterlife bans infrared cameras and locks the door from the inside, what exactly is being tested?